Twenty yards round the corner, away from the traffic roads, away from cottages and the need to impress their inhabitants and minus her rope, Annabel was a different donkey altogether. She still lingered to eat when she came to a particularly tasty patch, but with the air now of an independent deer stopping to graze, not a captive grabbing a last few mouthfuls en route for the hulks. And there was no need to cajole her to follow us. We only had to walk on round the bend and, with a drumming of hooves and the flash of a familiar pair of ears, Annabel was with us. Only for a second, mind you. A kick of a heel in our direction as she went to show that she wasn't really following us – she happened to be going this way herself and we'd better jump for the ditch Or Else – and Annabel was past us. Zooming round the bend ahead, whence she would either appear a second or so later coming like an express train in the other direction or else – if it was dusk and she was wondering whether we meant to go much further – peering cautiously back at us round the corner.
Annabel didn't like the dusk. She was frightened of the shadows and refused point blank to pass the cement patch in the dark because it shone whitely at her and she thought it was a ghost. Annabel wasn't as tough as she pretended in many ways. She knew our usual route through the forest – up the valley, across the stream, over the moor-top and down the hill behind the cottage – like the back of her hoof. She galloped that, in daylight, practically non-stop – backwards and forwards as we walked; leaping the stream like a steeplechaser now, not wading it with tremulous fear; and all this in a size so small it was like seeing a rocking-horse come to life.
We watched her, scarcely able to believe it. That a donkey could move like this, as fast and graceful as a colt. That she had this desire to stay with us even when she was free and full of spirit. And that if we did stop en route, to sit by the stream in the valley or admire the view across the river from the top, fast though she might be galloping when we halted, Annabel would stop too, and draw quietly nearer in the background. Close enough to keep an eye on us. Far enough, according to her lights, for us not to know she was doing it. And there, till we moved, she would wait. Our donkey of two months' standing.
On unfamiliar ground her determination to stay with us was even more noticeable. We would perhaps come up a track with a minor one leading from it and, calling Annabel, who in strange surroundings was apt to stop and gawk around her with the air of a tourist taking in the Grand Canyon, we would turn off along the side one. Annabel, wresting her interest a second or two later from an intriguing rustle in the undergrowth or a speculation as to whether it was worth going the other way to see what it was like up there, would look round, see that the main path was empty, and start galloping. Past the turning we'd taken, on till she came to the next bend and then, when she found we weren't around it, her hoofbeats would stop.
Sometimes she would gallop back. Sometimes she apparently crept back on tiptoe, because the first we knew of her being in the vicinity was a pair of ears poked antennaewise round a nearby bush. For quite a second or two until, having satisfied herself that she'd found us but we couldn't see her, could we? back she would come with a snort and a gallop, to pass us and start grazing a few feet ahead.
There were snags, of course, to letting her run free. One was that we didn't imagine this business of her creeping around on tiptoe. Sometimes she caught us up at a gallop. Other times, when the sense of humour took her, she came up behind us so quietly that the first I knew of it was a yell from Charles as she nipped him in the rear, I jumped yards with fright – and there, when we looked round, was Annabel right behind us, head demurely bent, eyelashes fetchingly lowered, and with an unmistakable wobble to her underlip which meant she was being funny. Guess who did that? she would enquire, looking coyly at us with her big brown eyes.
That was why – though I agreed with Charles indubitably that she was joking and it was only a pinch and it showed how much she liked us – that I usually walked ahead of him. That was why for quite a while, as an extra precaution, I always went out in a duffle coat. If Charles liked having his pants bitten by a donkey by way of affection I most certainly didn't. And that was why, on these long, free walks with her, we couldn't take the cats.
She might have nipped one of them on the tail – only in fun, but the result would have been two cats up the nearest pine tree and ourselves ringing up the fire brigade. She might have kicked them as she galloped. Again quite by accident. Annabel's kicks, light-hearted as a breeze; were never calculated to land. We'd long noticed that when she passed us in a wide track her kick was wide, too – exuberant, outflung as an arabesque and apparently missing us by a mere hair's breadth – but that when she passed us on a narrow path her kick was narrow to match. A mere slight sideways tipping of a hoof as she passed, and the surest proof she could give that we were friends and she was only playing.
But Solomon, when she galloped, got excited and galloped too. He and Annabel were doing Agincourt, he would roar, pelting along at her heels, his ears streamlined with excitement, filled with his old ambition to be a horse. So, just in case she kicked Henry the Fifth by accident, not knowing he was there, we entered on a new department of the daily routine whereby we took them for walks separately. Usually – for the sake of variety – in opposite directions. With the result that people doing circular tours in the neighbourhood would quite often meet us going up the valley accompanied, to their interest, by a pair of Siamese cats – up trees like monkeys, complaining that the lane was Wet or pretending to be courting – and then, coming back an hour or so later in the opposite direction, they'd meet us going along with a donkey.
They stared like mad the second time. They eyed us from beneath their eyebrows as if we were not quite all there – which, when we stopped to consider that we now quite voluntarily owned two Siamese and a donkey, we sometimes wondered about ourselves. If we turned to look at them we found they were invariably standing in the lane looking incredulously back at us.
One day, going out initially with Annabel, we passed a man on horseback who, after he'd got his frightened mare down on to all four feet again, said Funny little pet to have wasn't she, ha! ha! and rode on. An hour later, going the opposite way with Solomon and Sheba, we met him again. Hearing him coming, afraid that his horse might rear once more in the narrow lane, we grabbed the cats and jumped into the ditch. There, as he passed, we stood. Sheba scrambling over Charles's head with her back up. Solomon, who liked horses, complacently on my shoulder but with his tail anchored round my face so that it looked as if I was wearing a big black moustache. The man looked quite alarmed. Then, pulling himself together and probably assuring himself that if he humoured us he might make it even yet – 'Taking them for a walk?' he said.
We didn't care. We liked the cats. We liked Annabel, too, though we still weren't certain to what extent she liked us. Until, that was, the day I went out to see her after lunch and there, thinking nobody was about to shout at, she lay drowsily in siesta, outside her house in the sun. She had her front legs stretched before her like a sheepdog, as we'd seen her lie so often. Only this time there was no jumping up as I approached, nor even as I sat down cautiously in the straw beside her. Annabel, blinking contentedly in the sun, was half asleep. Annabel to my amazement, as I sat there stroking her nose and ears and wondering how fast I could get up if she decided to bite me, snorted dreamily, lowered her head and rested it lovingly on my shoulder.